Notes (OFVB 10/31): New Kinds of Data

Yes, now we learn about the option type which is the equivalent of Haskell’s Maybe, and is a great way to replace impure exceptions with pure types.

Interesting that (*) is parsed as a comment, and ( * ) is parsed as the multiplication function.

Questions

5

So looks like in OCaml there’s no special distinction between tuples and product types syntactically. So any constructor of a product is written like its a constructor of a tuple. I kind of like this, because, yes, product types and tuples are isomorphic. On the other hand, it’s a little syntactically messy compared to Haskell.

7

Interesting that this way of doing safeEval returns None rather than Some None. Exceptions just throw away their context, but I wonder if there’s a way to handle them while preserving the context.